Neustar, Inc. (NYSE:NSR), a trusted, neutral provider of real-time information services, today published its “October 2016 Worldwide DDoS Attacks & Protection Report: A Steady Threat in the Connected World,” a research report focused on DDoS attack and protection trends. The report highlights that DDoS attack volume has remained consistently high and these attacks cause real damage to organizations. The global response also affirms the prevalent use of DDoS attacks to distract as “smokescreens” in concert with other malicious activities that result in additional compromise, such as viruses and ransomware.

“Distributed denial-of-service attacks are no longer isolated events limited to large, highly visible, targets. Sophisticated attacks hit companies of all sizes, in all industries,” said Rob Ayoub, research director, Security Products, IDC. (Source: “Worldwide DDoS Prevention Products and Services Forecast, 2016–2020,” August 2016)

Neustar collected responses from more than 1,000 information security professionals, including CISOs, CSOs and CTOs to determine how DDoS attacks are impacting their organization and how they are mitigating the threat. Key findings from “October 2016 Worldwide DDoS Attacks & Protection Report: A Steady Threat in the Connected World” include:

• DDoS Attacks Are Unrelenting and Show No Sign of Abating: The overwhelming majority of surveyed organizations (73 percent) suffered a DDoS attack. Eighty-five percent of attacked organizations were attacked more than once and 44 percent were attacked more than five times.
• DDoS Attacks Are Only the Tip of the Spear in Complex Assaults: The majority of organizations that suffered a DDoS attack (53 percent) also experienced some form of additional compromise. Forty-six percent of breached organizations discovered a virus, malware was activated at 37 percent of breached organizations, and ransomware was encountered at 15 percent of breached organizations.
• DDoS Attacks Are Time-Consuming and Expensive: It can take hours to detect and mitigate a DDoS attack at significant cost to the organization. Seventy-one percent of organizations took an hour or more to detect a DDoS attack and 72 percent took an additional hour or more to respond to the attack. Forty-nine percent of surveyed organizations would lose $100,000 or more per hour of downtime during these attacks.
• Investment in DDoS Protection Shows Promise for Future: The overwhelming majority of respondents (76 percent) are investing more in DDoS protection than they were a year ago. The majority of respondents (53 percent) are using traditional firewalls, 47 percent are using a cloud service provider and 36 percent are using an on-premise DDoS appliance combined with a DDoS mitigation service (hybrid solution).

“As proof of the increasing threat and destructive nature of DDoS attacks, the industry has recently seen an incredibly complex, hacked IOT device-driven DDoS attack that surpassed 620 Gbps, lasted for multiple days, and crippled a high visibility website,” said Tom Pageler, Chief Security and Risk Officer of Neustar.

“Organizations should be concerned that DDoS attacks are growing increasingly sophisticated and relentless, frequently serving as the first stage of a multi-stage attack against an organization’s infrastructure,” said Rodney Joffe, Senior Vice President and Senior Technologist for Neustar. “There is a silver lining: as public attention is driving urgency to improve DDoS protection capabilities, organizations are increasingly realizing that having a DDoS mitigation solution in place is a requirement to keep your organization protected when a DDoS attack occurs.”

Neustar SiteProtect is a fast, flexible, global cloud-based DDoS mitigation network. Neustar SiteProtect offers automated mitigation, standardized traffic flows and visibility into attacks to deliver the greatest speed, flexibility, capabilities and expertise to organizations struggling to mitigate DDoS attacks.

Every day, the world generates roughly 2.5 quadrillion bits of data. Neustar (NYSE: NSR) isolates certain elements and analyzes, simplifies and edits them to make precise and valuable decisions that drive results. As one of the few companies capable of knowing with certainty who is on the other end of every interaction, we’re trusted by the world’s great brands to make critical decisions some 20 billion times a day. We help marketers send timely and relevant messages to the right people. Because we can authoritatively tell a client exactly who is calling or connecting with them, we make critical real-time responses possible. And the same comprehensive information that enables our clients to direct and manage orders also stops attackers. We know when someone isn’t who they claim to be, which helps stop fraud and denial of service before they’re a problem. Because we’re also an experienced manager of some of the world’s most complex databases, we help clients control their online identity, registering and protecting their domain name, and routing traffic to the correct network address. By linking the most essential information with the people who depend on it, we provide more than 12,000 clients worldwide with decisions—not just data.